Wednesday, January 1, 2014

Murakami/Rabinowitz/TheFall


Today I read the next fifty pages of Hard-Boiled Wonderland. It’s in this part of the novel that the themes of mind and identity begin to assert themselves much more clearly. In the Hard-Boiled Wonderland part of the novel, we learn more about what a Calcutec actually does; to be precise, we learn that a Calcutec’s training involves the extraction, reprogramming, and reinstallation of a Calcutec’s core consciousness. The Calcutec himself doesn’t know much about this process, and at this point, the reader is also not privy to the details. Meanwhile, in the Town it becomes increasingly clear that the Dreamreader’s problems largely derive from the fact that he still has what no one else in the town has, namely, a mind. As long as his Shadow survives, so will some semblance of his mind, but it is not clear whether or not the Dreamreader is string enough or even wants to maintain his mind under these circumstances. Once we find out that the Calcutec’s code word is End of the World, which is also another name for the Town, it becomes even more obvious that the two stories are interconnected. The disappearance of the Professor, and the Calcutec’s efforts to help his granddaughter find the Professor may shed more light on the nature of that connection.

I also read the next fifty pages of Paula Rabinowitz’s Black & White & Noir: America’s Pulp Modernism. This is an easy book to get confused about. It’s not really about noir in the conventional sense, and so fans of film noir and noir crime fiction are likely to be disappointed by it. It’s not even a book about materials that influence noir in the conventional sense of either ‘noir’ or ‘influence’! Rabinowitz is generally very careful not to argue for specific lines of influence (except in some cases that I’ll look at in future posts). Rather, it’s about noir as a kind of master key for America culture during World War II and in the postwar period. An example of this argument and approach is Rabinowitz’s chapter on the photography of Esther Bubley, who worked first for the Farm Security Administration and then for the Office of War Information. Rabinowitz argues that Bubley’s photos of the private and working lives of American women during wartime not only form an interesting and significant exception to mainstream patriotic boosterism but also invented “the icons of female pulp modernism—on the one hand, a kind of sleepwalking existence of endless sexual deferral; on the other, eventual economic self-sufficiency.” It’s a fascinating argument about a significant female artist of whom I’d never heard before reading Rabinowitz’s work. It shows just what Rabinowitz accomplishes here and how she does it.

I also watched the next episode of The Fall. When I first saw the scene where Gillian Anderson’s character initiates a one-night stand with one of the cops she meets in Belfast I thought it was a mistake, especially when that cop is subsequently murdered and everyone judges Anderson for what she did. Even if those judgements are clearly signaled to be a compound of hypocrisy and patriarchal double standards, the extent to which the viewer is now unavoidably focused on the sexuality of Anderson’s character rather than, say, her professional competence, initially seemed to me a distraction from the other themes the show was developing. Upon further reflection, however, I’ve changed my mind. As the murderer’s motives become somewhat more clear, it seems that the show as a whole is preoccupied with the ways in which a patriarchal culture attempts to control and judge (sexually active, professional, and independent) women by using everything from shaming to homicidal violence. In this sense, the sexuality of Anderson’s character is just as integral to the show’s goals as the murder plot.

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